Climate Law Blog

A look back at significant decisions in climate litigation in 2021 By Maria Antonia Tigre 2021 was a significant year for climate litigation, with several decisions worldwide providing a fresh look at stakeholder responsibility for climate change. The verdicts have shown that courts increasingly recognize climate change as a human rights issue, and that judges […]

IEA v. Brazil: When a court accepts the legally disruptive nature of climate change By Maria Antonia Tigre, Délton Winter de Carvalho and Joana Setzer On December 07, 2021, the Federal Regional Court of the Fourth Region (TRF4) – one of Brazil’s federal courts of appeal – decided what should be the competent jurisdiction to […]

Workshop on Global South Climate Litigation: A first step in a broader discussion on climate litigation in the Global South By Maria Antonia Tigre and Melanie Murcott Climate litigation is rapidly becoming a global phenomenon, making courts essential players in the movement towards employing climate governance to advance and protect human rights, and vice versa. […]

A new climate litigation claim in Brazil raises the pressure for increased climate action and protection of the Amazon rainforest By Maria Antonia Tigre On October 26, 2021, Observatório do Clima (OC), a network of 71 civil society organizations, filed a class action at the federal court of Amazonas against the Environmental Ministry and Brazilian […]

By Matthias Petel and Antoine De Spiegeleir * VZW Klimaatzaak v. Kingdom of Belgium & Others is a climate lawsuit brought in Belgium in 2015 modelled on the famous Dutch Urgenda case. In this groundbreaking judicial procedure, plaintiffs argued that Belgian public authorities have undertaken insufficient climate action and called for its enhancement. On June […]

By Maria Antonia Tigre   On September 20, 2021, the German environmental organization Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH) filed two actions against the automakers BMW and Mercedes-Benz for refusing to tighten their carbon emissions target and stop producing fossil fuel fuel-emitting cars by 2030 (DUH v. BMW and DUH v. Mercedes-Benz). The cases represent the first climate […]

By Maria Antonia Tigre The last few days saw two major developments in international rights-based climate litigation, with the adoption of a new resolution by the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) and a long-awaited decision on a climate case by the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC). This post takes note of […]

By Margaret Barry and Korey Silverman-Roati Each month, Arnold & Porter and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law collect and summarize developments in climate-related litigation, which we also add to our U.S. and non-U.S. climate litigation charts. If you know of any cases we have missed, please email us at columbiaclimate@gmail.com. HERE ARE THE […]

By Michael B. Gerrard The constitutions of more than three-quarters of the countries on earth have explicit reference to environmental rights or responsibilities  In the last several years courts in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Australia, Pakistan, Nepal and Colombia have held that these provisions, or similar non-statutory doctrines, require national governments to act on climate […]

By Margaret Barry and Korey Silverman-Roati Each month, Arnold & Porter and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law collect and summarize developments in climate-related litigation, which we also add to our U.S. and non-U.S. climate litigation charts. If you know of any cases we have missed, please email us at columbiaclimate@gmail.com. HERE ARE THE ADDITIONS TO THE CLIMATE CASE CHART SINCE UPDATE […]